The administration has accelerated direct talks with the Taliban, initiated several months ago, that U.S. officials say they hope will enable President Obama to report progress toward a settlement of the Afghanistan war when he announces troop withdrawals in July.

A senior Afghan official said a U.S. representative attended at least three meetings in Qatar and Germany, one as recently as "eight or nine days ago," with a Taliban official considered close to Mohammad Omar, the group's leader.

State Department spokesman Michael A. Hammer on Monday declined to comment on the Afghan official's assertion, saying the United States had a "broad range of contacts across Afghanistan and the region, at many levels. . . . We're not going to get into the details of those contacts."

As their boss sat Monday in a New York jail cell on sexual assault charges, employees at the International Monetary Fund expressed anger, sadness, embarrassment — and a recognition that his influential tenure was all but over.

Employees at the agency — a seminal Washington institution that draws hundreds of the best and brightest from around the world — huddled around televisions hungry for news of the case against IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. As they did so, they struggled to square his dapper bearing and public charm with the image, described in a New York City police charge sheet, of a nude man attacking a hotel chambermaid and now facing a possible 25-year jail sentence.

When Mamie Eisenhower was first lady, expectations for political wives were simple: Smile for the family portrait, flanked by children, husband and pets.

A half-century later, the wives of presidential candidates are part of the political apparatus, for better or worse. Their involvement in the campaign is obligatory, even if they are lukewarm to it. The job description now: chief character witness, with personal past as fodder.

That, however, could be a challenge for two Republican hopefuls with messy marital histories.

While Allen Stanford was flying high, he and his colleagues spent more than $10 million on campaign contributions and lobbying payments to curry favor in Washington. But all that money was diverted from investors in what authorities have called an elaborate Ponzi scheme, second only to Bernard Madoff's in U.S. history, according to court documents.

Since Stanford's arrest in 2009, a court-appointed receiver for the Houston-based Stanford Financial Group has been struggling to reclaim investor funds paid out to in-house and contract lobbyists, financial advisers and others whose services may have helped enable the scheme.

CHICAGO — The architect of the GOP's controversial Medicare overhaul delivered a forceful defense of the plan here Monday, saying it would empower seniors and accusing President Obama of having a "shared-scarcity mentality" that promotes "bureaucratically rationed health care."

Facing a backlash from voters over his proposal to turn Medicare into a system that subsidizes health-care coverage for retirees on the private market, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (Wis.) moved to recast the plan as the only one that would make the economy grow.

The administration has accelerated direct talks with the Taliban, initiated several months ago, that U.S. officials say they hope will enable President Obama to report progress toward a settlement of the Afghanistan war when he announces troop withdrawals in July.

A senior Afghan official said a U.S. representative attended at least three meetings in Qatar and Germany, one as recently as "eight or nine days ago," with a Taliban official considered close to Mohammad Omar, the group's leader.

State Department spokesman Michael A. Hammer on Monday declined to comment on the Afghan official's assertion, saying the United States had a "broad range of contacts across Afghanistan and the region, at many levels. . . . We're not going to get into the details of those contacts."

DUBUQUE, Iowa — On his first big trip to the first big state of the 2012 presidential race, Republican Newt Gingrich was supposed to start overcoming one of his bigger challenges: transforming his perpetually growing, always-evolving recitations on policy into the simple and coherent message of a White House contender.

The former House speaker instead found himself on the defensive about comments he made a day earlier on NBC's "Meet the Press," where he criticized a Republican proposal to partly privatize Medicare and defended a central tenet of the Democratic health-care law that passed last year: that people must bear more of the cost of their own medical care.

When Mamie Eisenhower was first lady, expectations for political wives were simple: Smile for the family portrait, flanked by children, husband and pets.

A half-century later, the wives of presidential candidates are part of the political apparatus, for better or worse. Their involvement in the campaign is obligatory, even if they are lukewarm to it. The job description now: chief character witness, with personal past as fodder.

That, however, could be a challenge for two Republican hopefuls with messy marital histories.

So it turns out Donald Trump got the joke after all. Or maybe he was the one who put one over on everyone else.

Either way, the reality-TV star and real estate mogul has concluded that the time has come to end it.

"After considerable deliberation and reflection, I have decided not to pursue the office of the presidency," Trump announced in a statement Monday. But he added: "I maintain the strong conviction that if I were to run, I would be able to win the primary and, ultimately, the general election."

While Allen Stanford was flying high, he and his colleagues spent more than $10 million on campaign contributions and lobbying payments to curry favor in Washington. But all that money was diverted from investors in what authorities have called an elaborate Ponzi scheme, second only to Bernard Madoff's in U.S. history, according to court documents.

Since Stanford's arrest in 2009, a court-appointed receiver for the Houston-based Stanford Financial Group has been struggling to reclaim investor funds paid out to in-house and contract lobbyists, financial advisers and others whose services may have helped enable the scheme.

The space shuttle Endeavour vaulted elegantly into the sky Monday, a spectacle of fire and power lent a grace note by the wounded congresswoman watching from a wheelchair below.

As Endeavour streaked into space, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who had watched from a rooftop with her husband's wedding ring hanging from a silver chain around her neck, looked up and said, "Good stuff. Good stuff," according to her chief of staff, Pia Carusone.

Giffords's appearance here to watch her husband, Mark E. Kelly, command Endeavour's final mission added a new chapter to a remarkable saga of survival and recovery, nearly 4½ months after she was shot in the head in an attack in Tucson that left six others dead.

The administration has accelerated direct talks with the Taliban, initiated several months ago, that U.S. officials say they hope will enable President Obama to report progress toward a settlement of the Afghanistan war when he announces troop withdrawals in July.

A senior Afghan official said a U.S. representative attended at least three meetings in Qatar and Germany, one as recently as "eight or nine days ago," with a Taliban official considered close to Mohammad Omar, the group's leader.

State Department spokesman Michael A. Hammer on Monday declined to comment on the Afghan official's assertion, saying the United States had a "broad range of contacts across Afghanistan and the region, at many levels. . . . We're not going to get into the details of those contacts."

JERUSALEM — A day after mass protests at Israel's borders set off deadly clashes, Israelis expressed concern that an alarming new chapter had opened in their country's conflict with the Palestinians.

"The nightmare scenario that Israel has feared since its establishment came true: that Palestinian refugees would simply start walking from their camps across the border, and with their own two feet try to realize the right of return," wrote Aluf Benn, a commentator in the Haaretz newspaper.

The worry came amid intense scrutiny of Sunday's clashes, in which Israel's military used gunfire to repel Palestinian protesters who marched from Syria, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and breached the frontier in the Golan Heights.

TEHRAN — In an action that could increase tensions between Iran and Arab monarchies, two Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf carrying Shiite activists to Bahrain were turned back Monday by warships belonging to a coalition of gulf states that is aiding the island kingdom in its crackdown on anti-government demonstrators, according to the activists' Web site.

The Shiite activists, members of the Islamic Revolution Supporters Association, said the Iranian government did not prevent them from sailing. But halfway to Bahrain, they decided to return to Iranian waters because of "the emergence of threats from the ships of the Peninsula Shield Force and the possibility of attacks," the Hameyema Web site stated Monday.

LONDON — British police said Monday that they received a bomb threat to central London, a day before Queen Elizabeth II's historic visit to Ireland and a week before President Obama's state visit to Britain. 

Early Tuesday morning, police carried out a controlled explosion of a bomb found in the luggage compartment of a bus traveling on the outskirts of Maynooth in County Kildare west of Dublin. A second suspected bomb turned out to be a hoax, wire reports from Ireland said.

The threat is thought to be linked to dissident Irish Republicans who oppose the peace process in Northern Ireland. Several streets around Buckingham Palace in central London were cordoned off Monday morning. Images on television showed a police officer strapped in a harness emerging from a manhole, reportedly checking sewers after the manhole was discovered ajar. 

TRIPOLI, Libya — Airstrikes and arrest warrants put negotiations in Libya ever further out of reach on Monday, as massive explosions rocked Moammar Gaddafi's compound just hours after international prosecutors said that he, his son and his intelligence chief had committed crimes against humanity.

The bombs that thundered across Tripoli on Monday evening reflected NATO's resolve to strike targets closer to the Libyan leader himself. The legal accusations narrowed the range of figures inside the Libyan government who could credibly make a deal with the forces that oppose Gaddafi, analysts said.

DUBLIN — Police and Army officials say a bomb found on a bus has been made safe Tuesday, hours before Queen Elizabeth II was due to arrive in Dublin.

The device was found in the luggage compartment of a bus traveling on the outskirts of Maynooth in County Kildare west of Dublin, officials said.

It was found late Monday night and was declared safe early Tuesday morning after a controlled explosion by bomb disposal experts. The bomb parts were given to the police for testing and investigation.

LONDON — British police said Monday that they received a bomb threat to central London, a day before Queen Elizabeth II's historic visit to Ireland and a week before President Obama's state visit to Britain. 

Early Tuesday morning, police carried out a controlled explosion of a bomb found in the luggage compartment of a bus traveling on the outskirts of Maynooth in County Kildare west of Dublin. A second suspected bomb turned out to be a hoax, wire reports from Ireland said.

The threat is thought to be linked to dissident Irish Republicans who oppose the peace process in Northern Ireland. Several streets around Buckingham Palace in central London were cordoned off Monday morning. Images on television showed a police officer strapped in a harness emerging from a manhole, reportedly checking sewers after the manhole was discovered ajar. 

MOSCOW — Russian opposition groups plan to hold a "festival of civil resistance" here Tuesday, to begin a campaign against the ruling United Russia party with an eye toward parliamentary elections late this year. The festival is to include a concert by various rock bands, including one that calls itself, in Russian, Boston Tea Party.

Organizers from an array of human rights groups and single-issue advocacy organizations said Monday that their goal is to end United Russia's monopoly on power, in part by pressing for open and fair elections. Mikhail Shneider of the Solidarity group said he doesn't believe they're chasing after a lost cause: 20 years ago, he pointed out, the Communist Party had a monopoly on power, and more means of enforcing it, and yet it lost everything.

BERLIN — Former U.S. President Bill Clinton has paid tribute to longtime German leader Helmut Kohl as "the most important European statesman since World War II."

Clinton and World Bank chief Robert Zoellick on Monday presented the 81-year-old former chancellor with the Henry A. Kissinger Prize, given annually by the American Academy in Berlin for exceptional contributions to trans-Atlantic relations. Kissinger, a former U.S. secretary of state, also was present.

Kohl led Germany from 1982 to 1998. He presided over the reunification of east and west in 1990, then led a reunited Germany in NATO and at the heart of a united Europe.

Four days after he limped around TPC Sawgrass and pulled out of The Players Championship with left leg injuries, Tiger Woods announced Monday evening that he is "likely" to play in next month's U.S. Open at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, though he described the situation as "week-to-week" and offered no definitive timetable for a return.

Woods said it is unlikely he'll play any competitive golf before the June 16-19 Open, leaving him with just nine holes in tournament play since the Masters — a period of 66 days — a significant layoff for a player who insists some of his recent struggles are due to the fact that he has played so infrequently.

VIRGINIA WATER, England — The European Tour says it is considering changing its logo to an image of Seve Ballesteros, who died this month.

The current logo features a silhouette of Harry Vardon, a six-time winner of the British Open between 1896 and 1914, but many high-profile golfers want it changed to honor Ballesteros.

The tour said Tuesday in a statement there has been a "wave of emotion regarding Seve's unique contribution to the development of the European Tour" and the ways his memory could be honored.

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — Tiger Woods says he didn't do any more damage to his left leg at The Players Championship and expects to play the U.S. Open next month.

Woods made it only nine holes last week at The Players — his shortest tournament ever — when he withdrew after nine holes because of what he described as a chain reaction of pain from his left knee to left Achilles and tightening in his calf. He shot 42 on the front nine.

On his website Monday, Woods said he irritated the knee and Achilles without making them worse. He said doctors have advised rest, cold water therapy and soft tissue treatment, which he said he already had been receiving.

LONDON — The site of the 2018 Ryder Cup will be announced Tuesday, with many players and fans hoping European golf officials will honor Seve Ballesteros by sending the event to Spain.

The five-time major winner died this month following a three-year struggle against the effects of a brain tumor. Ballesteros' family is among those suggesting that Tres Cantos, north of Madrid, should win out over bids from France, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal.

"It would be the greatest tribute to him," Baldomero Ballesteros said at his brother's funeral last week. "I appeal to the sensitivity of the Ryder Cup Committee of the European Tour to agree the greatest honor that could be bestowed on Seve is to award the competition to Spain. I appeal on behalf of the family."

Until the NBA draft, former Georgetown point guard Chris Wright will work out on his own and in front of teams in hopes that one of them will call his name June 23 at Prudential Center in Newark. 

But should the NBA and its players' association continue on their current path, little will change in Wright's schedule after that, whether he is drafted or not. The league's collective bargaining agreement is set to expire June 30, and unless a new agreement is reached before then, the NBA could experience its first work stoppage in 13 years.

The Washington Capitals finished yet another disappointing season after getting swept in the playoffs. The Washington Wizards also finished another disappointing season, their third straight. That begs the question: is it worse to be a fan of a team that everyone knows is bad, and then performs exactly as expected, or to be a fan of a team that everyone expects great things from, and then fails miserably? Would you rather have six months of mostly unappealing basketball or five months of great hockey followed by two weeks of carnage? With apologies to Caps fans who still wake up screaming from images of Backstrom skating indifferently up and down the ice, I'll take the hurt of unmet expectations over rooting for a bunch of ping pong balls one Tuesday night in May.

The sight of Derrick Rose making one of those dynamic, twisting, acrobatic drives to the basket or Russell Westbrook breaking down a defense and dishing to Kevin Durant should serve notice that the NBA is moving a little more swiftly these days.

The playoffs used to be a time when veteran teams used their experience and patience to brush aside young, exuberant upstarts and make them wait their turn. But this postseason is showing that, aside from the Dallas Mavericks, the youngsters aren't willing to wait. And why should you expect them to when they are accustomed to getting everything else at the touch of a button? There is no better time for a takeover than right now.

Monday afternoon, hours before he would walk to the plate for the night's most crucial at-bat, Danny Espinosa joined several teammates for early batting practice. He needed to work out a mechanical kink in his left-handed swing that had pulled him into a slump and irked him for days. Friday, after an extra-inning loss, he grabbed a bat minutes from midnight and walked out of the Washington Nationals' clubhouse to the batting cage.

"At times, it can probably be too much," Espinosa said. "I feel like I need to be in there."

The Pirates are in town for two games, and this should be an interesting series in regard to strikeouts. As an offense, the Nationals have struck out 327 times, third-most in the majors. The only teams with more are the Padres and … the Pirates, who both have 328.

So there will be a lot of Ks over the next two days, right? Maybe, maybe not. Nationals pitchers have struck out 257 batters, sixth-fewest in the majors. The only National League pitching staff with fewer strikeouts? Naturally, the Pirates, who have struck out 254 batters this season.

Wilson Ramos will bat cleanup tonight for the second time this season, and he remains the only rookie in the majors to start a game batting fourth this season. A few factors are in play for the Nationals' rookie catcher to hit fourth – Ryan Zimmerman, of course, is out; the Nationals have slumping hitters up and down their lineup; they're facing a lefty, and Manager Jim Riggleman wants to have a right-handed hitter bat behind Jayson Werth, which means Adam LaRoche will hit seventh.

"I'm not looking for a classic cleanup hitter, a home run-type run producer," Riggleman said. "We're just looking to send up as many good hitters in a row as we can against this left-hander. But I have a lot of confidence in his ability to hit. His stroke has got away from him a little bit lately, but he's such a good hitter, we feel like any day now, he's going to come out of it."

The tarp is on the field at Nationals Park after a fierce, but brief, rainstorm passed through. There are still some gray, ominous clouds overhead, but, at the risk of trying to predict the weather, it should pass in time for tonight's game and maybe comeback in the late innings. (Tomorrow is another story. Yikes.)

In the meantime, here are some injury notes on a few banged-up Nationals.

>>> Center fielder Rick Ankiel, who has not played since May 2 with a sprained right wrist, took batting practice today for the first time since injuring his wrist; previously, he had only hit off a tee. "It felt real good," Ankiel said. "I think it's about coming in tomorrow, seeing how it responds. Then we'll go from there."

With Paul Maholm starting for the Pirates, Michael Morse will receive his second start since May 3, and Laynce Nix will be on the bench after 11 consecutive starts. Wilson Ramos will bat cleanup. He gets his second start batting fourth, and he's the only rookie in the majors this season to hit cleanup.

The Nats are 3-6 this year against left-handed starters.

Nationals

"The Devil's Light," Richard North Patterson's ambitious novel of nuclear terrorism, opens with Osama bin Laden in a cave in western Pakistan, discussing with two followers a plan to explode a nuclear weapon above an American city on Sept. 11 of this year, the 10th anniversary of the original 9/11 attacks.

In the real, nonfictional world, bin Laden was killed by American forces at about the time this novel was reaching bookstores. Patterson and his publisher could be forgiven if they wondered if this otherwise welcome news might be bad news for his novel — writers and publishers think like that — but I suspect it will not hurt the book's prospects and might even enhance them. Bin Laden's death certainly put the once-elusive terrorist back in the news, and the novel presents an interesting portrait of him, not only as a mass murderer but as a visionary, even a kind of poet. Moreover, if bin Laden had in fact set in motion a massive 10th anniversary attack, it might well be as complex and bloodthirsty as the one pictured here, and it would almost certainly be going ahead despite his death. In that sense, we won't know until Sept. 11 just how much fact there is in Patterson's fiction.

This summer, you won't hear sizzling grills and sloshing coolers in the sprawling gravel parking lots that surround Jiffy Lube Live. Tailgating has been banned at the 25,000-capacity venue in Bristow that's owned and operated by concert-promotion behemoth Live Nation.

That means no tents, no picnics and no alcohol will be allowed in the lots before hotly anticipated concerts from Toby Keith, Lil Wayne, Jimmy Buffett and others. The venue's general manager, Matt Rogers, said the new policy is an effort to stem drunken driving, which, in the past two years, has taken four lives after concerts at Jiffy Lube Live.

NEW YORK

"I will not be running for president. See you for a great season," "Celebrity Apprentice" star Donald Trump announced Monday at NBC's new-schedule presentation to advertisers at a Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan.

Trump, of course, has been much in the news lately, saying he was mulling a run at the White House and jumping on the whole "birther" movement and holding news conferences to congratulate himself.

A concert crowd being admonished for not dancing ranks just below a Metro escalator outage on the list of common D.C. occurrences. But it was hard to find fault with the largely stationary nature of the attendees packed into a sold-out 9:30 Club on Sunday night to see ascendant Swedish pop queen Lykke Li. She expressed her displeasure — as politely as possible — after a song called "Dance Dance Dance" failed to inspire much movement from the assembled.

Okay, maybe there should have been a bit more shimmying to that one. But what was a slinky and seductive song on her 2008 debut album "Youth Novels" was transformed into an overblown almost-epic Sunday night. It rumbled instead of twinkled. It just wasn't the right fit and served as a microcosm of the show itself.

The space shuttle Endeavour vaulted elegantly into the sky Monday, a spectacle of fire and power lent a grace note by the wounded congresswoman watching from a wheelchair below.

As Endeavour streaked into space, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who had watched from a rooftop with her husband's wedding ring hanging from a silver chain around her neck, looked up and said, "Good stuff. Good stuff," according to her chief of staff, Pia Carusone.

Giffords's appearance here to watch her husband, Mark E. Kelly, command Endeavour's final mission added a new chapter to a remarkable saga of survival and recovery, nearly 4½ months after she was shot in the head in an attack in Tucson that left six others dead.

"The Devil's Light," Richard North Patterson's ambitious novel of nuclear terrorism, opens with Osama bin Laden in a cave in western Pakistan, discussing with two followers a plan to explode a nuclear weapon above an American city on Sept. 11 of this year, the 10th anniversary of the original 9/11 attacks.

In the real, nonfictional world, bin Laden was killed by American forces at about the time this novel was reaching bookstores. Patterson and his publisher could be forgiven if they wondered if this otherwise welcome news might be bad news for his novel — writers and publishers think like that — but I suspect it will not hurt the book's prospects and might even enhance them. Bin Laden's death certainly put the once-elusive terrorist back in the news, and the novel presents an interesting portrait of him, not only as a mass murderer but as a visionary, even a kind of poet. Moreover, if bin Laden had in fact set in motion a massive 10th anniversary attack, it might well be as complex and bloodthirsty as the one pictured here, and it would almost certainly be going ahead despite his death. In that sense, we won't know until Sept. 11 just how much fact there is in Patterson's fiction.

In the cafeteria wing of NBC Washington's Nebraska Av­enue studio, three different strategies are afoot.

The boys from Quince Orchard are cramming. What is the term for a change in the base sequence of DNA? Who was Charles the Bold? The name of the street on which the first traffic light appeared was —